'Pit Bulls and Parolees' moves to New Orleans

The New Orleans 9th Ward branch of the Villalobos Rescue Center won’t officially open for a few more weeks. But already the clients are coming.

Animal PlanetTia Torres of 'Pit Bulls and Parolees.'

“Yesterday we had a sweet old couple pull up in their rickety pickup truck,” said Tia Torres, mother figure to the center’s more than 100 rescue pit bulls. “They said they had a couple of mommies and their babies. We went over to their property over in the Lower 9th. They're overwhelmed. They don't know what to do. It was a good deal gone bad. A dog wandered into the yard, like it does with everyone else around here.

“Before even we began our day this morning, they showed up again and said, ‘Please, we really need your help.’ They really, really, really cared about these dogs and they needed help.

“So we went over this morning. It's in the neighborhood where a lot of the houses were still left over from Katrina. One of the litters of puppies was under a trailer, and the other litter was up this huge flight of stairs. We were walking on the frame of the staircase going up, because there were no stairs. The houses, of course, were filled with mold. You could smell it going in.

“So we now have 20 puppies. We’re washing them right now, picking fleas.”

Fans of the Animal Planet reality series “Pit Bulls and Parolees” know the story well. The triumphs and travails of Torres, her family and her staff – many of whom are former convicts, hence the title -- have been documented on the show since 2009.

As viewers who tune in to the current season’s finale at 9 p.m. Saturday (Feb. 11) will learn, the show’s setting will change for future seasons.

Frustrated by regulatory challenges to running a pit bull shelter in her home state of California, Torres has moved her base of operations to a former warehouse near the upriver base of the Claiborne Ave. bridge over the Industrial Canal.

“Some of the new restrictions were so tough, there was no way I could un-ring the bell,” she said. “I said, ‘We’ve got to leave.’ I did the smart thing and started looking at other parts of California, and every time I called a place they said, ‘Oh, yeah. You can have a kennel here. How many dogs do you have?’ I’d say, ‘Oh, about 100.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, hell no, you ain’t coming here.”

Torres said she considered fudging her dog total, at least in the early stages of searching.

“Then everybody had to remind me, ‘Tia, you have this little thing called the TV show.’ It became impossible for us there.”

Torres also has an outpost in New Mexico for dogs she’s not likely to place in foster homes. But for now and going forward, she and “Pit Bulls and Parolees” are New Orleanians.

Torres first became familiar with the city while doing post-levee-failure pet-rescue work here.

“Katrina is what brought us here,” she said. “We became very involved because of the pit bull population, the pit bull problems.

“We just kept coming back and coming back.”

Still, urban New Orleans wasn’t an obvious destination when her California issues became unmanageable.

“One of the places we looked at was in Arkansas,” she said. “Beautiful state. I was going to move to the Ozarks. Then Animal Planet said, ‘Hello, Tia, how many abused pit bulls are running around the Ozarks?’

“We wanted to be where we were welcome and needed. And New Orleans serves both purposes.”

Torres is currently living in an office above the main warehouse room in the shelter. She, her four grown children and about a half-dozen staffers have made the move from California.

“I have a couple of guys who are still on active parole in California,” she said. “They’ll be off parole soon and they’re coming here. That’s really good.

“I have several volunteers from California that are relocating here now. They came down once to help me, said they love it and they’re coming back. I’m bringing an army.”

An army is what’s needed. That’s why Torres and Animal Planet agreed to jump the gun on an interview that technically spoils a story point in Saturday’s finale. Though the shelter won’t officially open until sometime in March, Torres is already lining up volunteer help.

One program she’s started to build that corps is called Bully Boot Camp, an intensive one-week, on-site sleepover training program.

“People from all over the country come here and do what we do, endure what we endure,” she said. “They stay for a week at a time. Some stay longer. Some have lasted an hour. Some leave in the middle of the night.”

There are less-strenuous ways to help, too, including a weekly dog-walking program. (Learn more by clicking “Volunteer” on the shelter’s website, www.vrcpitbull.net.)

Torres, who’s in the reclamation business for two species of hard-cases, has also begun putting out feelers to correctional institutions to begin the effort of recruiting new parolees to work at the shelter.

On the whole, the move has gone well so far, Torres said.

“Our first weekend of moving in, which was cleaning up the place, we had the guys from the railroad yard come over,” she said. “ ‘What’s going on?’ ‘We’re cleaning up and putting up a dog rescue.’ They said, ‘We’ll come over and help you.’ They brought food. They had a barbecue for us. In California, you don’t know your neighbors for 10 years. As the moving process moved forward, people in the neighborhood dropped by, bringing us food. Always bringing us food.”

Torres, who wears a fleur-de-lis ring she’s had for years, said she’s also made friends with the NOPD.

“The police pulled me over the other day,” she said. “I'm thinking, ‘Great, my first ticket in New Orleans.’ I get out of the truck and I say, ‘What did I do?’ They said, ‘I knew it was you!’

“In California, I was never recognized. Hardly ever. My daughters even went to a big dog function out there, a dog show, and they were so snubbed by the people, who were downright rude and mean.